Book Briefing: The Secret Desire Shared by Many Workers

Join The Atlantic‘s James Parker, Editor-in-Chief, and Jeffrey Goldberg, Editor-in-Chief, for a discussion about Parker’s new book, Help me get through the next five minutes: Odes to Life. The conversation will take place at Politics and Prose at The Wharf, in Washington, DC, 610 Water Street SW, on August 12 at 7 p.m.

What a thrill it is to go to a truly terrible boss and vent all the frustration you feel about your job! I’ve never done it and I don’t really want to—I have a pretty nice job right now. But the intense, vindictive impulse to tell off an incompetent manager, lose your temper with an infuriating coworker, or simply say no to someone who tells you what to do is, I think, a secret fantasy of anyone who works for a living. This week, Chelsea Leu put together a list of books to read when you’re ready to throw on your uniform and quit your job.

First, here are four new stories from The AtlanticBooks section of:

Among his picks, of course, is “literature’s most famous quitter,” Herman Melville’s “pale, gentle Bartleby,” who tells his baffled boss “I’d rather not” when asked to do a task. And his list reminded me of a contemporary example: Kristi Coulter’s character Exit interviewa perceptive and insightful memoir that I recommended to my social circle of ambitious women in their late twenties. It details Coulter’s rise at Amazon and what ultimately led to her departure, with humor and style. (The book is worth reading for her voice alone.)

Exit interview is also a fascinating document of more than a decade as a woman in a male-dominated tech industry. With appropriate rage and frustration, Coulter takes stock of all the slights she’s racked up over the course of her career: the crude jokes from male colleagues, the years she wasn’t promoted, an intense corporate culture that drove her to alcoholism. But she also captures what made Amazon so alluring, especially the sheer thrill of solving problems that no one else could. And the money, of course—she made a lot of money, even if in her telling she struggles to explain to her husband that she doesn’t.feel overpaid. Amazon could deposit a million dollars a month into my checking account and I would think, Yes, that seems fair, considering the fear, the chaos, the unpleasant environment, the ever-increasing demands, and the fact that no one ever says thank you.“When she recalls that moment of self-deception, she includes the voice of clarity she had ignored at the time: her husband reminding her that it was her choice to keep this maddening and health-destroying job. “Stop lying to yourself that you are the only person you know. can’t“You can leave at any time,” he told her. “You chose to stay.”

Readers who want an honest account of the ethical costs of Coulter’s work won’t find it: Her role, she writes, was completely isolated from Amazon’s massive delivery infrastructure, where “workers spend their days picking and packing in million-square-foot warehouses where they face punishing productivity expectations, constant surveillance, high turnover, and serious injuries,” as my colleague Ellen Cushing reported in 2021. Two years earlier, The Atlantic The book published Will Evans’s report on how “the company’s obsession with speed turned its warehouses into injury factories.” Coulter doesn’t defend Amazon or seek to untangle its complicity, because that’s not the point of her story. Early in the book, she writes, “I’m not telling you what was right or good. I’m telling you what happened and how you felt.”

When I finished my memoir, I advised all my friends—women who had a litany of trite stories of bad bosses, standard harassment, and unrewarded perfectionism—to read it and think about what we really gain from working hard. It’s certainly a book that stokes the embers of the desire to walk into a boss’s office and quit.

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What to read when you want to quit smoking

By Chelsea Leu

These headlines help readers think through pressing questions about modern employment, including whether it’s time to leave.

Read the full article.

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What to read

The Games Must Go On: Avery Brundage and the Olympic Movementby Allen Guttmann

It is difficult to understand the modern Olympics without first understanding Avery Brundage, an American athlete, Chicago real estate developer, and later president of the International Olympic Committee. His style was brash: he was unafraid to exclude a top athlete or dismiss the need for women’s sports. But as Guttmann argues in his definitive biography of this morally complex man, perhaps no one has shaped the governance of the Olympics more. Brundage helped transform the Olympics from a largely European, club-based affair into a truly global institution. He was an early advocate of expansion, pushing for the 1940 Olympics to be held in Japan (though those Games were canceled because of the war). He helped persuade the USSR to participate for the first time, instituted the first doping controls, and cemented the gender-testing policies that determined who was allowed to compete in women’s sports for decades to come. Brundage also solidified the IOC’s generally agnostic relationship with world politics. He saw no problem in letting the Nazis host the Olympics in 1936, writing that the Olympics should not interfere in politics. Years later, as IOC chief, Brundage remained true to those beliefs: “In the 1960s, after the United Nations tried to ban South Africa from competing, Brundage lobbied to let the country participate anyway.” Guttmann untangles Brundage’s many failures while acknowledging that, for better or worse, he is the reason the Olympics exist as they do today. Michael Waters

On Our List: Seven Books That Will Change the Way You Watch the Olympics

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Coming out next week

📚 Kent Stateby Brian VanDeMark

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Your weekend reading

A 500-year-old intoxicating mystery

By Ariel Sabar

The Voynich manuscript came roaring back into (Lisa Fagin) Davis’s life, forcing her to reconsider almost everything she thought she knew about it. The manuscript’s notoriety—as history’s most difficult mystery, as the stuff of wild conspiracies—has frightened scholars for years. But what if you looked beyond its outlandish strangeness? What if you focused instead on the little-noticed things it shared with countless other manuscripts?

Could the ordinary illuminate the extraordinary? Davis decided to find out.

Read the full article.

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